The Martin-Baker ejector seat was introduced to service by the R.A.F in 1947. Two years too late.
This spitfire pilot, returning home to his wife, son and 2 daughters, after a succesful mission, suffered engine failure not thirty miles from the landing strip.
Air Cheif Marshall, Winston dandelO-Smythe was never seen again.
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It seems everyone here is messing around trying to create decent looking cumulus. So, here's my most recent attempt.
I have a good lot of different cloud scenes on the go just now, including: Cumulus Fractus, mammatus, towering cumulus, etc. This is the first one done and dusted.
Just a mass of rolling cumulus and a high level cirrus to break up the background sky. The plane was really just an after thought. Usually I'd stick a boat in there and be done with it in a scene like this, I toyed with that and then decided to put use to the fantastic Spitfire model that was drawn attention to here some weeks ago.
Cloud stats that were changed in the cloud layer:
Altitude - 1765
Depth - 3000
Sharpness - 25
Density - 0.006(default)
Colour - 0.175
Scattering colour - 0.5
The only lighting change is: Fake internal scattering - 1.75
The only tweaks change is: Flatter base - checked.
I use less dense cloud than most folks doing large cloud like this, this is because I like to illuminate the cloud from inside, it works better in my opinion.
Edge sharpness really makes the clouds appear denser and this makes it easier to illuminate them than if they are really thick(and keeps samples down to reasonable detail=1 levels). I make my cloud colour about 0.1 to 0.2(not too far from black, this one is 0.175) and then light them from the inside with propagation/envirolight/fake internal scattering enough to overpower this dark colour. This really defines the limits of the edge of the fractal, when you light it up correctly of course.
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Thanks for looking! :)
dandelO.
Very nice clouds! I kind of like the low cloud density, but it still seems like you could raise the samples a little bit more get rid of grain. The shape is fairly good overall, but as a focus of the scene I think it would be good to add detail. Don't take these critiques the wrong way - I think you've done a great job :).
Gotcha, OB.
The 3/4 quality final uncropped test render of the clouds appeared better I think, more contrasted. Once you up the detail for a final render, though, it becomes 'better' calculated, lighting especially, I find. This would be helped if GI was calculated the same for test crops as it is for full image rendering, I suppose that'll be fixed eventually...
Great job, dandelO. Now make an animation...or someday, maybe.
This was a seven hour frame. I have a dual core P4. 1gb RAM. Doing any kind of anim isn't in my near future! :D
Cheers, man! :)
Yeh, I like the clouds (don't mind a bit of grain in them either). Is the smoke trail from the Spit another cloud layer, or post painted in?
John
Cheers, Schmeerlap. The smoke trail is a cloud layer via painted shader. The explosion is my internal TG2 explosion object from my first public library pack. :)
The grain is somewhat bothering me, too, but not overly. I'm rendering the main cloud body again anyway with upped detail and no acceleration cache, they were detail level 1 with conservative acceleration in this render. Now it's 1.5 no acc'.
Update to follow, maybe something else to make it less empty feeling, I really don't know, though. I kind of like the solitude the pilot's probably feeling... So close to living - yet so very, very far.
Cheers!
I would think that the grain is from not enough atmosphere samples. Q1 on cloud samples usually is sufficient. If then there is still grain it's always the atmo - from my experience.
cheers,
Frank
As I said above I'd update this soon.
The only changes I've made are described in my last post, here's the result.
Frank: The noise I was kind of bothered by in v.1 seemed to be in the whitest parts of the cloud fractal details, the dark parts looked not too shabby, I thought. Atmo samples would mostly affect the darker, shadowed areas of the cloud. It is still the same 64 samples here. The noise is mostly gone now, I think. (I'll go and hunt out that snow/stones thing now...)
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Cheers for looking, again! :)
The clouds do look better and I didn't think that was possible.
Cheers, man! :)
Quote from: dandelO on January 17, 2009, 02:36:56 PM
Cheers, Schmeerlap. The smoke trail is a cloud layer via painted shader. The explosion is my internal TG2 explosion object from my first public library pack. :)
...
Can I please ask you
how you did his? I have been trying to figure out how to make the paint stick to a volumetric cloud layer, but it seems like this can't be done. Some say it can, some say it can't. Apparently, it can, according to your (excellent) picture. :)
Any tips?